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| Legislation Needed To Hammer Spammers |
November 10, 2003 |
By Jim Harris
After being away for five days I come back to 1,500 plus E-mails in my inbox. Mmore than 80 per cent of these are spam and even though my spamware program
will shift 1,200-plus spam to a quarantined box, I still have to review all of them before hitting delete. In my business a single E-mail can be worth $10,000, so I have to be really sure no legitimate messages are deleted.
All of which means I am really angry about the amount of time junk e-mailers are forcing me to waste.
Spam is really theft: it is cheap for Spammers to send out millions of junk emails a day and it imposes an expense on the rest of society. It’s like answering the phone from a telemarketer and being forced to pay for a collect call.
Our politicians have not enacted legislation to penalize Spammers.
Spam accounts for half of all e-mail traffic in 2003, and by mid 2004 it will grow to 60 per cent, according to a recent Gartner report.
The cost of that to organizations is horrendous. Estimates vary widely: Ferris Research figures Spam will cost American companies US$10 billion in 2003, the Radicati Group estimates the worldwide cost at more than US$20 billion; and Nucleus Research puts the cost to American companies at almost US$90 billion in lost productivity.
Spam drains organizations of productivity and bandwidth, and requires them to install and maintain extra servers, buy and maintain Spamware and ultimately to lose business when legitimate e-mails are filtered out by anti-Spam processes.
Some Internet users pay for each e-mail they receive. For instance, RIM BlackBerry user pay fees based on the amount of data they download. The greater the volume of Spam, the higher the fees.
And it is getting worse. Volume has been doubling every 18 months, according to Radicati Group, and by 2007 it estimates the cost of Spam will grow to more
than US$200 billion!
While you may only have to spend a few minutes a day deleting Spam, when that time is added up for hundreds of millions of employees worldwide the costs
mount quickly.
SMALL GROUP, BIG DAMAGE
It is a staggering fact, but a mere 169 companies and individuals are responsible for more than 90 per cent of the Spam transmitted worldwide, according to the Spamhaus Project, a London-based anti-Spam organization that keeps the Registry of Known Spam Operations.
For instance, Ronald Scelson, a known Spammer, testified at U.S. Senate hearings in May 2003 that he sends between 120 million and 180 million e-mails every 12 hours for a range of products as varied as insurance, mortgages, vacations, automobiles and software.
Most large organizations employ Spamware to catch Spam. But there are problems: sometimes legitimate e-mails are filtered out. False positives will cost American businesses US$3 billion in 2003, according to Ferris Research.
Some Spam filters use key phrases such as “Viagra” to identify Spam.
However, you wouldn’t want to do that if you work for Pfizer, which makes Viagra.
Some anti-Spam programs use the blacklist approach, a list of known Spammers.
But as they constantly change their addresses, sometimes on an hourly basis, to avoid detection this is a short-term solution only.
A white list approach uses the list of known contacts to identify legitimate email, a strategy for reducing false positives.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
1. Spammers employ bots that automatically scour Web sites for e-mail addresses.
So only publish e-mail addresses as graphic images on your Web site, never as text.
2. Join the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail at http://www.cauce.ca, and write to your MP and demand immediate, tough legislation on this issue.
3. If you’re an end user and are being overwhelmed by Spam you can install off-the-shelf Spamware, such as I Hate Spam, which retails for US$20 at http://www.ihateSpam.us.
4. Keep two e-mail accounts, a primary account and a free Hotmail or Yahoo one.
When filling out forms online or in chat rooms only use your free account so as to not overload your primary account with a load of Spam.
5. Never reply to a Spam e-mail, even if it is asking to be taken off a list. That only confirms your address is valid.
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